Talk politics.

In early 1994, I was walking through the Makiki neighborhood of Honolulu on my way to a weekend event at the high school where I taught. I was 24 and had been a teacher for all of half a school year. It was, to be honest, a hard transition having moved 6000 miles from home and having just lost my grandfather a month earlier, but I was growing to truly love my new home and my job.

So I was just about to cross one of the main roads, and I witnessed a group of boys -- about 11-12 years old or so -- taking turns running into the street, lying down and then getting up and running to the other side. They did this several times, even as cars were coming rumbling down the blind corner of the hill just to the mountain side of the neighborhood.

And I lit into them. Probably my first true moment of generational ranting and fueled by my own recent loss, I yelled at them for risking that, told them their parents would be crushed if they got hurt and what about a poor driver who'd have to live with hitting them if they kept up that nonsense? For good measure, I told them if they didn't leave right then and there, I'd get a cop and have them dragged home kicking and screaming. I'm not exactly a scary guy, but they left.

I found out later that there was either a popular TV show or movie that was out at the time that had people doing stupid stunts and that these kids were likely immitating it. Over the next years in the classroom, it was pretty evident that popular culture and discourse was pretty capable of working quite a lot of influence on people. Students of mine spent a disconcerting amount of time treating me to their renditions of Beavis and Butthead, and a generation of students who were familiar with the Ricki Lake Show and Jerry Springer betrayed signs of having become convinced that the person who shouts the loudest wins the argument. As a twenty-something college graduate, I was afflicted with the particular conceit that the media reflects rather than influences society, but my work teaching pushed the credulity of that.

I think it is obviously true that words and messages have impact. If they didn't American businesses would probably have better uses for the $125 billion (more or less) they spend on advertising. On a personal level, I am sure if words and images did not matter, I wouldn't find Progressive Insurance Company to be cute and perky despite my having no personal experience with the company beyond its advertising front:





Let me get a couple of points of bias aside before continuing:

First, I do think our political rhetoric has become poisoned in America. It is not that people were not fierce partisans in the past, and it is not that we have not had even WORSE political environments where hot words were actually matched with hot deeds (think of Bleeding Kansas and why that name actually applied as an example). However, in my lifetime, there has been a substantial upping of the ante in political rhetoric in the mainstream of commentary, activism and even political leaders that would have been pretty unthinkable except in the margins previously. Since my first year in college, Democrats have gone from being "soft on defense" and "tax and spend liberals" to "traitors" and "socialists". Republicans have gone from being "the party of the rich" to "fascists" who'd just as soon see the poor die.

I won't be so disengenuous to say that there isn't a stridency on the left of American politics. It is that stridency that prevented me, despite my strong opposition to the war in Iraq, from joining street protests and limited my activism to letter writing and door to door canvassing during the elections. It was because I did not want to stand next to this:



or this:



My arguments with the Bush administration were based upon his adherence to a Nixonian theory of Presidential power and his launching a war of choice against the wrong enemy -- not that he had seized all the levers of government in a dictatorship and launched a ruthless total war and genocide across an entire continent. Lacking a taste for hysteria and hyperbole, I worked a lot more quietly.

With that said, I do agree with people who claim the conservative wing of American politics has gone far and beyond in recent years. That's an impression and an opinion and there will be people who vigorously disagree with it -- and I'm fine with that. I stand by the observation because I simply have not seen an equivalent number of liberal media personalities with the same reach and audience as Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck and Malkin pursuing the rhetorical excess that typifies these people. Nor do I see an equivalent number of Democratic elected officials who imitate the voices of the most extreme commentators on the left. Further, there has been an even more extreme coarsening of the tone from hyperbolic claims (Obama is a Socialist!) and counterfactual assertions (Obamacare is going to kill my baby with Downs Syndrome!) to implications that we are near a point where "government tyranny" will require a violent response.

All of that said, I stand by my initial rant about the response to Congresswoman Giffords being shot...abundant use of the word "fuck" and all.

A great many on my side of the political aisle immediately saw a connection between the attemtped asssasination of a Democratic Congresswoman and the rhetoric of recent years, and quite a few of them jumped at the chance to exploit it as political fodder against conservative commentators, the Republican party in general and the Tea Party specifically. It only helped that opportunity that Giffords herself was challenged in her recent reelection by a Tea Party backed candidate who used shooting references in his campaign against her and that Giffords' district appeared in Sarah Palin's...."surveyor's mark" map from last summer.

It's an opportunity that never should have been taken.

This community has been treated to numerous posts warning of the dire consequences of rhetorical excess from the right of American politics and comparing several prominent conservatives to the likes of Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels who both served as leading "idea men" for the Nazi Reich and were considered responsible for the eventual deeds of the Reich.

That's a hell of a charge, and it bears some examination because if, as I opened with, words DO influence people and if words in our political discourse bear resemblance to those used by the most notorious propagandists of modern history, the consideration of whether or not it could happen here and whether or not certain actors in our politics are trying to make a version of it happen here has to be considered.

This is already a huge post, but I'd like to briefly explain why I think that oft flung charge is simply another partisan talking point that is attractive for confirmation bias purposes, but ultimately too simplistic. Julius Streicher may have been a publisher, but within short order of his joining the Nazi party, he was appointed Gauleiter of Nuremberg, the undisputed party head in his jurisdiction and "advisor" to the local government. Since the Nazi Party was organized with paramilitary forces, a Gauleiter had real authority and, more importantly, goons at his disposal with which he could unleash violence. Goebbels was deeply involved in the decision making that led to the Final Solution. So even if a cursory examination of the language used by Glenn Beck, for example, results in use of phrases and terms typical in Nazi propaganda, the men who used that propaganda took actions beyond publication that made them culpable for the atrocities of the Reich.

Another example we've been given repeatedly is that D.W. Griffith's A Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the founding of The Second Klan. I'll stipulate that historians widely cite the film as an inspiration for the new Klan and provided the romantic image of the original Klan used to recruit members. But honestly, that is too simple. Remember that America in 1915 was a country where white supremacism was not a fringe ideology -- it was mainstream enough that President Woodrow Wilson's explanation of the original Klan was featured in the film:



In the decades PRIOR to both the film and the reestablishment of the Klan, gangs of "witecappers" spread as secret societies among white farmers in rural Indiana and spread as a vigilante movement to enforce "proper" behavior. And when it spread to the South, it took on a decidedly racist tone attacking blacks and anyone supportive of blacks. So the Klan arose, not merely inspired by a film, but also into a society whose President romanticized Nathan Bedford Forrest and which already had a cell organized, vigilante movement that was spreading anti-immigrant and racist violence years before the Klan was founded again.

It seems obvious to me that mass violence is not simply "set off" by rhetoric, even by years of it. Even the Rwandan genocide which shocked the West with its sudden onset wasn't merely incited by the hate speech on the radio. Those broadcasts told Hutu listeners they were in immediate danger, were used to call up Hutu paramilitary groups sanctioned by the government, and gave specific names of Tutsis to be killed and where to find them. Further, the genocide played off of inter-ethnic hatreds stemming from decades of colonialism. Talk alone doesn't lead to mass violence in a vacuum.

Rush Limbaugh has been successful since the election of President Clinton. Ann Coulter published her first book in 1998. Glenn Beck has been preaching against progressives, declaring the President a socialist and misrepresenting the specifics of the health care bill for two solid years. And yet in spite of this, the most obviously heated period of our political struggles was in the summer of 2009 when 1000s of Tea Party Activists descended upon the health care town hall meetings and....shouted a lot. A lot of it wasn't factually correct. Quite a bit of what was documented was rude, even cruel to people disagreeing. You know what it wasn't? It wasn't a riot. Or a pogrom.

So if it isn't mass violence that we can pin on this kind of rhetoric and influence, surely we can blame it upon individual actors who are directly listening to it and believe it? I don't think so. Think about those 11 year old boys I described before the cut. Were they inspired by, maybe even got the idea to lie down in traffic from what they watched? Probably, yes. But a whole lot of other things were at play there as well. They were boys. And they were 11. By definition, that means they were pretty dumb and prone to taking idiotic risks. They were completely unsupervised at the time. Perhaps their parents were not especially good at teaching them prudent judgment.

The same set of complicated factors in decision making has to be applied to anyone who listens to and is potentially influenced by media that they consume. Another reason that the "You are responsible if people use your words as inspiration for violence" line of attack is unfair is that it ignores the vast vast majority of listeners who do not do so. When there are 10s of millions of prolife people in this country, but only a miniscule fraction of them have been violent, there is more than prolife rhetoric at work. Those events are shocking and they are searing, but the average clinic worker or patient at Planned Parenthood is infinitely more likely to be shouted at than shot. And that has to have something to do with how a micro fraction of listeners to polemics process that rather than an inherent danger in the polemic itself.

Now saying all of that, I think that the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords and the deaths of others present at Tucson IS an excellent opportunity for all of us to take stock in the way we are discussing, or, rather, failing to discuss politics in this country.

This isn't because anyone on the right is responsible for what happened to Congresswoman Giffords, her staff, friends and constituents. They are not, and people on the left who have tried to rush into blaming them for it should apologize. The reasons for all of us to collectively reconsider our discourse are:

1) The way we are doing it today is making us stupid. Accusations. Epithets. Counter factual claims. Facts that aren't facts. They are flying across our partisan landscape with a speed and volume that only our modern disinformation age can manage. But far from "liberating" us, it has made many of us the gatekeepers of our own partisan bubbles where we refuse to let in information that does not conform to our existing biases.

I tried listening to "Air America" a few years back when Randi Rhodes was an anchor show. It was horrible -- I found myself embarrassed to be on the same side of political spectrum as she was, struggling to keep from yelling at my radio. I've watched a few of Keith Olbermann's patented "Special Commentaries" and found them satisfying in the sense I wasn't the one yelling...but I can't watch the show consistently or even sit through a whole episode.

This new media as a source of information is a lot like eating potato chips for lunch...it can fill you up and even seem satisfying, but it provides just about zero of what you need. Face it, if you get most of your information from partisan broadcasts and blogs, chances are that you are really fucking stupid.

2) We are only furthering the trend of failing to work together because we are all Americans despite of our differences, a principle that is core to the kind of Congresswoman Ms. Giffords is. I've followed her career since 2006 when she was profiled in a Jewish magazine, and I have a friend who covered her first campaign in 2006 and is a true admirer of hers. This lady is the real deal -- she's smart, she's patriotic, she's principled, she's an honest broker across party line and precisely the kind of public servant who will be disgusted when she sees how her tragedy has been used for crass partisan gain.

The fact is that there is serious work that our politicians are entrusted to do, but as we've willingly consumed greater and greater amounts of partisan vitriol, the bases of both parties insist on purity of ideology over accomplishment. Think about the Democratic base lashing out at Senator Lieberman for daring to support the Iraq War when the rest of his record was certainly reasonable from liberal perspectives. Think about Republican partisans demanding the head of Lindsey Graham for daring to not vote in lock step. The fact is that where the parties were once more ideologically diverse and cross party cooperation was essential to get anything done, today's parties are much more narrow and nomination requires the approval of ever more entrenched base voters who don't see the other side as opponents, they see them as enemies.

In 1983, such partisans as President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill came together and hammered out a plan to save Social Security. Look at this photo:



One cannot help but realize that the bases of both parties today would react with fury to two politicians being statesmen and working together, but that's what we need today.

Finally, and maybe most importantly -- We should look into ourselves and tone it down because the most touching and important reactions to what happened in Tucson should tell us that we are nation and that the people we oppose politically are our fellow citizens with lives, hopes, dreams and families, and that the arguments which energize us should not become the anger that divides us. Cut away the slop of "you are responsible!" and "how dare you say that!" and you get a truly bipartisan reaction of shock, sorrow and hope for the Congresswoman's recovery. I've never deferred to reality_hammer in this forum before, but his excellent first words on the events of last Saturday should have been a model.

And we ARE shocked and we ARE sad, but Representative Giffords is not a football in a political slugfest -- she is a decent human being, a wonderful public servant, and she is not unique in that respect. Our common bonds should be rooted in our desires for what is best for our nation, our communities, our families and ourselves, regardless of our disagreements about how to achieve that.

So...if you are outraged and sorrowful about Tucson, but your first thoughts were how to spin the story to your partisan advantage, you are doing it wrong. If you're are outraged and sorrowful about Tucson but would go out tomorrow and plan an election campaign as nasty as the one that exploited the fact that Giffords' husband would not vote for her....leaving out that he's an ASTRONAUT with children from another marriage who live near mission control in Houston...well, if you'd do that all over again to her or anyone else, you are doing it wrong too.

So yes, this is a moment for us to consider our political rhetoric -- but it is a moment for us to all reflect upon whether or not we are contributing to the best in America or simply relishing giving in to currents that prevent us from working together.

And as a final, I promise, thought -- if reading this gives you hope and puts a smile on your face, then I think you are part way there.